tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13005893Fri, 04 May 2018 09:03:08 +0000Charts 2010Crisis CentreProcessartistspenabledtablet PCCommissionsGiant DaysGooSketch Fiestamanga studio 4A hundred dance moves per minuteShowbiz kids, making movies of themselveshttp://sgrblog.blogspot.com/noreply@blogger.com (John A)Blogger793125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13005893.post-1138192275374112078Thu, 05 Mar 2015 16:15:00 +00002015-03-05T16:23:42.005+00:00On continuityAs I finish up this weird final Bobbins story, &nbsp;I've repeatedly asked myself, "what am I doing?" After 16 years and counting of the same continuity, the greatest difficulty I have is making my work approachable to new readers while retaining the old ones. As a comic book reader in my youth, comics leant heavily on continuity, but I never remember it being a huge problem. If someone or something reappeared, it was never a huge mental leap to accommodate the new reality of this returning figure/recurrent situation.<br /><div><br /></div><div>But I don't have the luxuries that the creators of an issue of Alpha Flight from 1988 had. I don't have an editor to straighten things out. I have a fallible human memory of nearly 5000 pages of comics, with no master document detailing the relationships between various characters. There's no wiki to keep things straight. Frequently, I can't remember minor characters' names at all. The greatest danger is to dredge up something tempting from 2001, because I am the last person who should be allowed to curate his own history</div><div><br /></div><div>Bringing back Bobbins was one of the most fundamentally idiotic things I have ever done and worst of all, I did it because the idea was funny to me. I was talking to my friend Jeremy one afternoon about Bobbins, and the following evening, the slogan "Bobbins is back" sprang to mind. I thought this was hilarious, and drew the original characters' faces in my sketchbook. Within a couple of weeks, I'd done the first strip that appears as part of The Case Of The Forked Road. I loved doing that little story, about how Ryan meets Amy, but I have a feeling that if you were to check it against the original Bobbins comics, there are some... <i>fairly problematic interactions</i>&nbsp;in there. I'm not sure how the project persisted past that original point. The revival has now been going on for half as long as the original comic ran.</div><div><br /></div><div>With Bad Machinery done, and Expecting To Fly (a Bobbins prequel that also includes its fair share of misremembered/fudged history) complete, I thought I'd do some Bobbins comics to fill in while I worked on Giant Days for Boom and Bad Machinery 4 for Oni Press. I never set out to make something convoluted, but as the weeks have gone on, it's folded over and over on itself into something crazy.</div><div><br /></div><div>People sometimes ask me why there's Bobbins, and Scary Go Round, and Bad Machinery, "when they're all just the same thing." The answer is, so that I can work out where the line is between these projects, so I don't have to remember too much, so that I can divide it all up semi-neatly. This last Bobbins story is what happens if I take out all those dividing lines in my head, just so you can see what it looks like. It's a mess. I've started to get emails from people asking for clarification on certain "historical" characters, which suggests to me that it's time to stop. Time's pretty much up for the "Tackleverse", which is why I did it - this is the end of the road for a lot of the characters.&nbsp;</div><div><br /></div><div>I hope you enjoyed the experiment as much as I have - it's gone in directions I didn't expect. At the start of April it will be time for something new.</div>http://sgrblog.blogspot.com/2015/03/on-continuity.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (John A)23tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13005893.post-8296347276680646333Mon, 03 Nov 2014 16:28:00 +00002014-11-03T16:29:10.833+00:00Goodbye, Bad MachineryAfter a couple of months of thinking about it, I've decided to conclude Bad Machinery with <a href="http://the%20case%20of%20the%20modern%20men/" target="_blank">the Case Of The Modern Men</a>. It feels like the right time to do it. The characters have outgrown the setting, the premise and the format. I've tinkered with the comic for three cases, with mixed results - a whole story of giant pages, then lots of little strips, but I've felt like I was in a holding pattern for the last couple of years. I don't want to stop telling stories with these characters, but I'm not sure I can do much more with them without returning to the drawing board. There's definitely more to come from Charlotte, Shauna and the rest of them, but you might not see much of them for a little while. With the third book released in December and five more stories to go, Oni's beautiful print editions of Bad Machinery should continue unabated. I'm really proud of what they've done with my work.<br /><br />Needless to say, comics won't stop in the meantime. When Expecting To Fly ends this Friday, Bobbins will return for a run of a few months (6 or 7 days a week) while I work on the 4th Bad Machinery book and a (currently secret) print project. I came up with so many ideas creating the idiotic, fictitious "Scary Go Round universe" over the last couple of months, that I see no reason for anyone to panic any time soon. The website will probably revert back to being called "Scary Go Round" as an umbrella for all the different things I've been doing over the last five years.<br /><br />Thanks to everyone who has supported Bad Machinery. Think of this as a Doctor Who-style regeneration in progress. Your friends will be back.http://sgrblog.blogspot.com/2014/11/goodbye-bad-machinery.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (John A)25tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13005893.post-6486344616374040543Tue, 20 Aug 2013 21:16:00 +00002013-08-21T08:51:06.853+00:00Manga Studio 5 EX - first impressionsManga Studio 5 EX was released last week and, having used version 4 EX (<a href="http://www.macworld.co.uk/digitallifestyle/reviews/?reviewid=3219" target="_blank">which I reviewed here for MacWorld</a>) every day for the last four and a half years, I was keen to get my hands on the new version. The upgrade from version 3 to 4 had been a great pleasure, so I had held on for the pro EX version, which included the story management features I use to keep myself organised. What I found was, to put it mildly, a mixed bag.<br /><br />MS5 EX isn't really an upgrade. It's a completely different program. Earlier versions were a westernised version of Celsys Comic Studio. The new version is a different program - Clip Studio.<br /><br />Sadly, it has not been localised very well. Menu options are sometimes offered in a lousy pidgin English that, while close to comprehensible, still leave one in doubt. &nbsp;Were this version of Manga Studio a masterpiece of usability, I don't think this would matter. But it's not. It's a melée of menus, submenus, optional customisations, and interface contradictions so gnomic that one is frequently sent into the seven-fold preference menus to try and right things.<br /><br />Herein lies the contradiction that makes the struggle seem somewhat worth it - at the heart of the madness is an excellent program with which to draw comics. The pen tools are, largely, better. They can be tweaked to your heart's desire. There are new perspective rulers which make a mockery of MS4's fiddly version (though these are retained for those who are used to them). There are a myriad of new colouring features which will please anyone who doesn't want to colour in Photoshop. Huge paper sizes are now available if you need them. It feels snappier. The manual is 650 pages long, &nbsp;I'm sure that there is plenty more iceberg underwater.<br /><br />But on trying to draw a comic with the ease I did in Manga Studio 4, I came across several issues that meant I couldn't. I list these merely as a caveat for other upgraders who may be thinking of switching. Such is the nature of the program that, given four or five hours of tweaking, you could probably make it behave the way you want it to - but it seems almost cruel of SmithMicro to offer this software out of the box with so many indiosyncratic differences from its predecessor. Here are ten things that drove me crazy:<br /><br />1. The pen and pencil cursors are the same. So if you switch between the two with your shortcut key, as I do all day long, you can't tell immediately which one you're using. Of course, should you wish to draw with a pastel, that has its own cursor. Perhaps the pastel lobby is more powerful than the pencil lobby.<br /><br />2. Correction has been taken out of the pen menus. Good luck digging the mess it is now out and reinstating it. One of the best features of MS3 &amp; 4 was that if you turned correction right up to 20 and drew a stroke, it was a straight line with a variable width based on how hard you pressed down - as if you'd drawn a nib line with a ruler. Now, no matter how you tweak its numerous settings, the super-corrected line shrinks to a razor-thin line. If you relied on that feature to quickly draw lines, you won't be doing that any more.<br /><br /><i><b>EDIT: I worked out how to make it work like it used to. Click the spanner (bottom right) to bring up tool settings. Select 'correction' from the menu on the left. Click the check box (the little eye) so the 'post correction' option is visible on the tool menu. Check 'bezier curve' only under that. You'll now get straight, relatively uniform lines like MS4 when correction is switched on. &nbsp;Feel free to play with the other settings - bezier curve is the one that restores the familiar behaviour.</b></i><br /><br />3. Instead of numerical sliders to change settings, some options are represented by a series of slightly different grey blocks. Good luck remembering which grey box you clicked, and what numerical value it denotes.<br /><br /><i><b>EDIT: You can change this. CMD-click on the blocks, select 'show slider'.</b></i><br /><br />4. The straight line and shape drawing tool, panel ruler tools and ruler tools are all under one icon. I found them eventually. Panel cutting was a very neat and tidy operation in version 4, but it's reverted to the complicated setup I think I remember from version 3, generating nested folders and masks. I don't know why. Perhaps someone knows why.<br /><br /><b><i>EDIT: You can turn the nested folders off (you'll still get one big nested folder) - in the tool properties for "divide frame folder", select "not change". Not change! Now, when you chop things up, all the artwork is behind one mask.</i></b><br /><br />5. The layers palette has been broken into two separate entities. The relationship between these two is as complex and delicate as the relationship between those four organisms that make up the Portuguese Man O War. And as difficult to understand. Remember when there was a button to make your pencils into a blue line? Now, merge a couple of layers, one blue-lined, and things become very complicated very quickly.<br /><br />6. Remember the old square eraser that you could turn to an angle? And it was big when you zoomed out and small when you zoomed in? I'm sure you can restore that but after an hour of trying, I gave up.<br /><br /><i><b>EDIT: If you want a square eraser (I couldn't work out how to easily angle it), select eraser, go to tool property, select brush shape, click 'material', look for a brush called 'small', it's a square.</b></i><br /><br />7. Everything is set to anti-aliased. Set aside some time to really enjoy putting things back to 2-bit. <br /><br />8. There are a lot of new pencils, but they look and feel different to the MS4 pencil. You can import your old pencil, but it doesn't look the same. I'm sure this is something I'll get used to, but it would have been nice to have had the option. You can import all your old tools from MS4 if you wish, but the results are a mixed bag.<br /><br />9. Saving and organising your page templates has gone from placing them in one simple menu by saving the page as a template, to having to select a load of layers, make them into material, then place them on a paper template, after digging them out from all the other templates provided.<br /><br />10. The interface is a huge mess. It's a disaster. I heard complaints over the years that MS4 had an ugly interface. It wasn't beautiful, but it worked, and it was easy to get by with a bare minimum of screen real estate lost. The new version is almost exquisite in its visual bloat.<br /><br />I don't think this a bad piece of software, per se. It's learnable. But I honestly think that SmithMicro are dishonest in pushing this as the same line of software. Customisable as it is, they could have made at least some concession to their existing users. Out of the box, it is more disruptive than helpful to long term users. For six or seven years, I've touted Manga Studio as software that makes making comics easier and more pleasant. This is the first version I've used that doesn't do that. And that's a shame.<br /><br /><br /><br />http://sgrblog.blogspot.com/2013/08/manga-studio-5-ex-first-impressions.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (John A)18tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13005893.post-5071420123292237851Fri, 05 Jul 2013 16:08:00 +00002013-07-05T16:08:51.682+00:00Tall comicsFor the new Bad Machinery story I decided to do tall comics. I had been working in a landscape format for three and a half years, and for most of that time I had felt completely constrained by the format. Landscape creates a world of problems with pacing. Or rather, it created a world of problems with pacing for ME. I found myself slicing my two rows up into ever smaller slivers in an attempt to move things along.<br /><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/--FSiWp0SQck/UdbvEw90LBI/AAAAAAAABsg/9CkRQLn5yzk/s1600/20120906.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="226" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/--FSiWp0SQck/UdbvEw90LBI/AAAAAAAABsg/9CkRQLn5yzk/s320/20120906.png" width="320" /></a></div><br /><br />The new format I'm drawing in isn't really double the size of the old pages - that would take twice as long to draw - it's probably a third to a half more real estate. I am sure that some kind of mathematical hero will tell me exactly how much more room to&nbsp;manoeuvre&nbsp;I have. But the additional space has already started to change the comics - there's room to be thinky and (hopefully) funny at the same time, to switch scenes mid-page, and explore ideas without running out of page.<br /><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-XdOKPGXBGfo/UdbvPHLSDtI/AAAAAAAABso/4KLMJ00N9qc/s1600/20130618.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-XdOKPGXBGfo/UdbvPHLSDtI/AAAAAAAABso/4KLMJ00N9qc/s320/20130618.png" width="226" /></a></div><br /><br />The change of format feels right as well because Bad Machinery is about characters who are getting older with each case, and as they get older, the nature of the comic will change. The adventures of 11 year olds are distinct from what 14 year olds would get up to. I think there's room to make these changes, and define the cases from number 7 onwards differently.<br /><br />(Case number 6 feels awkward and transitional to me, I'm not sure I want that one to come out as a book. But you can see what I was heading towards now)<br /><br />When I've seen the Bad Machinery book racked in bookstores, it's a little disappointing to see it next to Batman, rather than with the kids' books. Needless to say, I intend to capitalise on this placement by including a violent night vigilante in all future stories. But the one thing I do like about the landscape format is how much wider than Batman my books are. Stuff you, Caped Crusader.http://sgrblog.blogspot.com/2013/07/tall-comics.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (John A)5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13005893.post-228212429135431354Sun, 19 May 2013 16:50:00 +00002013-05-19T16:50:08.065+00:00Flatting & trapping for scared webcomics artists<div>I was near-apoplectic&nbsp;with fear before I handed my pages over to Oni Press. I was sure they were going to tell me off for my unflatted pages. All I have ever done is scan my linework at 600dpi in black and white, converted to RGB, coloured white bits between the lines with the paint bucket, converted to CMYK, and prayed. (Sometimes I didn't even pray.)</div><div><br /></div>There's a lot of nonsense talked about flatting and trapping comics for print. There seems to be a huge hangover of ancient lore. Whenever I see a post where someone describes painstakingly lifting their linework up and filling the areas behind it - whether with the BPelts plugin or otherwise, I feel sorry for them. If you work with black and white line art, you don't need to do this. You don't have to try to colour a page, pre-monstered with the BPelts multifill, that looks like this:<div><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://selfcentent.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/08/flatting-blog-multifill.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="160" src="http://selfcentent.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/08/flatting-blog-multifill.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><i><br /></i></div><div><i>(My apologies to the artist in question, who I am not singling out for criticism. Quite the opposite - he/she is plainly a brave soul)&nbsp;</i></div><div><i><br /></i></div><div>On my older books, just the act of converting to CMYK turned the RGB black into a very rich CMYK - too rich really. But I got away with it. Before I sent my art to Oni, I tried to find out what the correct rich black ratio was. I figured that was the only way I might get away with not having to painstakingly recolour hundreds of pages.</div><div><br /></div><div>MY PROVEN SYSTEM/ONE WEIRD TIP:</div><div><br /></div><div>If your line art is solid black (ie scanned at a high resolution and not anti-aliased), colour the page any way you want, then convert to CMYK if the page isn't CMYK already, select all the black linework at the end and fill it with a 60C/40M/0Y/100K black. That's it. I've done this for multiple major comic book publishers, as well as on my own self-published work, and it is apparently wholly acceptable in preventing trapping errors (white hairline gaps around the lines when pages aren't properly registered). &nbsp;</div><div><br /></div><div>NOTE: Don't colour your lettering this way. Keep it 0C/0M/0Y/100K or it will look slightly fuzzy on the page.</div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div>http://sgrblog.blogspot.com/2013/05/flatting-trapping-for-scared-webcomics.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (John A)1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13005893.post-1052491571550293715Fri, 19 Apr 2013 10:07:00 +00002013-04-19T10:07:00.891+00:00BAD MACHINERY VOLUME 1 OUTSIDE N. AMERICAI've had a number of messages from people struggling to get the Bad Machinery book outside the USA, particularly in the UK and Australia. Here's what to do:<br /><br />1. If you have a local comic shop, they can order it for you if it's not in stock. Just ask! It's in the system.<br />2. In the UK? Amazon.co.uk has it. If you <a href="http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/1620100843/ref=as_li_qf_sp_asin_il_tl?ie=UTF8&amp;camp=1634&amp;creative=6738&amp;creativeASIN=1620100843&amp;linkCode=as2&amp;tag=badmach-21" target="_blank">use this link</a>, I get a little bit of extra cash that way. Hate Amazon's tax-dodging ways? Use <a href="http://www.foyles.co.uk/witem/fiction-poetry/bad-machinery-volume-1-the-case-of,john-allison-9781620100844" target="_blank">Foyles</a>.<br />3. In Australia? <a href="http://www.kingscomics.com/product_list/pages/product.php?Operation=SetSessionVariable&amp;Variable%5BProductCodeID%5D=NOV121261" target="_blank">Kings Comics</a> has it.<br /><br />I'm afraid you can only get the hardcover <a href="http://www.topatoco.com/merchant.mvc?Screen=PROD&amp;Store_Code=TO&amp;Product_Code=SGR-TCOTTS-HARDCOVER&amp;Category_Code=SGR-BOOKS" target="_blank">direct from Topatoco</a> or direct from Oni Press. If you want a personalised book, I will be selling adhesive personalised bookplates from the beginning of May.<br /><br /><br />http://sgrblog.blogspot.com/2013/04/bad-machinery-volume-1-outside-n-america.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (John A)2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13005893.post-9202079402682389680Thu, 18 Apr 2013 14:12:00 +00002013-04-18T14:12:29.684+00:00He found in the world without as actual what was in his world within as possible <a href="http://mbvmusic.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/01/scott-miller.jpg" imageanchor="1"><img border="0" height="256" src="http://mbvmusic.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/01/scott-miller.jpg" width="400" /></a><br /><br />For the last fifteen years I've thought it a criminal waste that no one really took notice of Scott Miller, the polymath frontman of Game Theory and the Loud Family. He released ten albums of varying ambition but relentless quality. Albums that I found it hard to pass on to others but that, to me, felt like a precious roadmap to the emotional tundra of a man's early twenties, just as Scott's <a href="http://www.loudfamily.com/scottlist.html">carefully compiled album charts</a> unlocked huge swathes of music for me and encouraged me to <a href="http://scarygoround.com/charts.htm">compile my own</a>.<br /><br />With the exception of a brief collaborative return in 2006, Scott stopped making records in 2000 - two years after I first heard his music. Through second hand shops, Amazon, kind friends and music blogs, I was able to plug all the catalogue gaps left by bad deals. The further away we became from this music being made, the easier it was to actually hear it. <br /><br />But it was Scott's <a href="http://www.loudfamily.com/askscott1998.html">writing on loudfamily.com</a>, which never went away, that was his greatest influence on me. Answering fans and allies' questions with exacting precision, he treated pop music, art, literature and science with the same rigour and humour. His answers were gracious, thought-out and kind. When people began to write to me about my own work, I used Scott as my template. I didn't have to think about how to relate to "fans". It was easy. You treated them like smart people. You wrote back to them the way Scott Miller did.<br /><br />His writing on music in recent years was arguably, even better. In a field where drift and posture often stand in lieu of knowledge and perspective, he made the rare distinction of having both.<br /><br />Of course it would take his awful, early passing at 53 for voices to unite in support of this great, thoughtful man. Some of his answers revealed a painful self-deprecation in his awareness of the rock career arc, his withdrawal from the game to avoid pressing on to minimal return. To be told today that he was just about to come back to music was heartbreaking. But that's a selfish feeling. With the words he wrote, with the records he made, he'd done enough. He'd done more than most.<br /><br /><iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/ofn341CzgoQ" width="420"></iframe>http://sgrblog.blogspot.com/2013/04/he-found-in-world-without-as-actual.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (John A)1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13005893.post-985659292085527374Tue, 02 Apr 2013 12:52:00 +00002013-04-02T12:52:49.994+00:00Bad Machinery vol 1 is OUT NOW!<a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-DfKLlYGHK9g/UVrUM0WWaFI/AAAAAAAABUI/IHadBT6vZ58/s1600/Screen+Shot+2013-04-02+at+13.50.36.png" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-DfKLlYGHK9g/UVrUM0WWaFI/AAAAAAAABUI/IHadBT6vZ58/s320/Screen+Shot+2013-04-02+at+13.50.36.png" /></a><br /><br />I'm very proud to announce that the first Bad Machinery book, The Case Of The Team Spirit, is <a href="http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/16292250-bad-machinery-volume-1" target="_blank">now available from Topatoco</a>! Published by Oni Press, it contains the first Bad Machinery case (and the pre-amble). Running to about 140 pages, it features many new pages of story and loads of extra material, including an in-depth guide to the fake history of English football that I can only describe as "dense", "nutty" and "extremely time-consuming to write".<br /><br />The book is available in <a href="http://www.topatoco.com/merchant.mvc?Screen=PROD&amp;Store_Code=TO&amp;Product_Code=SGR-TCOTTS&amp;Category_Code=SGR-BOOKS" target="_blank">standard paperback</a> and <a href="http://www.topatoco.com/merchant.mvc?Screen=PROD&amp;Store_Code=TO&amp;Product_Code=SGR-TCOTTS-HARDCOVER&amp;Category_Code=SGR-BOOKS" target="_blank">strictly limited hardback</a> editions. Unlike my Scary Go Round collections, it is not a bijou volume. It's HUGE - 9 x 12 inches - and beautifully designed. <br /><br />As I've said before, these stories were meant to be read as books, and I'm grateful to Oni for giving me the chance to put them out in such lavish fashion. I hope to collect all the stories this way and get them to the widest audience possible - and needless to say, I can't do that without your help. Recommendation to friends, <a href="http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/16292250-bad-machinery-volume-1" target="_blank">a Goodreads review</a>, a mention anywhere that you can tell someone that something pretty reasonable is going on here. <br /><br /><b>A NOTE FOR PEOPLE OUTSIDE THE US/CANADA:</b> The book is also available from your local comic shop. You can just walk in, give them some money, and walk right out of there completely satisfied. Give it a go! What's to lose? Good comic shops in England: Page 45 (Nottingham), Gosh!, Orbital (London), Dave's (Brighton), Travelling Man (Leeds, York, Manchester, Newcastle). But wherever you go - comic shop or normal bookshop, if they don't have it, they can get it for you. <br /><br />If you have any questions about this volume, post them in the comments section and I'll do my best to answer them.http://sgrblog.blogspot.com/2013/04/bad-machinery-vol-1-is-out-now.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (John A)7tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13005893.post-8213239026036287425Thu, 14 Mar 2013 13:05:00 +00002013-03-14T13:06:10.337+00:00Spot the differenceI'm currently working on the second Bad Machinery book for Oni. There's a lot of new material in the book version of The Case Of The Good Boy, and there are a lot of fixes to do - I took a rough and ready approach at the time that has meant endless touch-up to make the story fit for the large format books that they're coming out in. Enjoy a game of spot the difference with this page (maybe the worst I had to work on for mis-shapen, off-model figures, unfinished lines and slapdash colouring). <br /><br />If you feel like posting "I preferred the original," oh, go right ahead. I don't mind.<br /><br /><a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-BkiO_2SPufM/UUHLCj6r4QI/AAAAAAAABT0/8GQ2UeUJxYc/s1600/20100503.png" imageanchor="1"><img border="0" height="640" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-BkiO_2SPufM/UUHLCj6r4QI/AAAAAAAABT0/8GQ2UeUJxYc/s640/20100503.png" width="452" /></a>http://sgrblog.blogspot.com/2013/03/spot-difference.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (John A)6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13005893.post-4580247937175276358Mon, 04 Mar 2013 12:25:00 +00002013-03-04T12:25:38.793+00:00Post webcomicsOccasionally I become concerned for the future. The hairs on the back of my neck stand up, I break a sweat, and my face twists into an appalling rictus. Tearing up floorboards, earth and finally the living rock itself, I attempt to bore into the earth's molten core until the local council or a concerned family member intervenes. <br /><br />For the last ten years, I've made my living through a bizarre system. I put my work up for free, and through a combination of merchandise sales, advertising, freelance work (that I only get because I'm known through my free work), I've been able to sustain myself at a modest level. Through my own hard work and the efforts of a few others before and after me, I've existed within an ecosystem which can support someone with a decent readership.<br /><br />In the last few years, the Internet has begun to change fundamentally. For a lot of people, social media ARE the internet. Comics like mine used to build followings through a system of patronage and word of mouth via links from other comics, popular blogs - in essence, journalistic models. The barrier to entry, pathetically low compared to the agonies of making one's niche work known pre-Internet, still required a certain amount of negotiation. You had to be able to make a website. You had to do a bit of networking. You had to be able to FTP something. You had to put in a modest amount of effort.<br /><br />A few years later, we have Tumblr. There are people who put all their work up on Tumblr, and don't put it anywhere else. It's so easy! Drag and drop! Their comics exist, contextless, in a stream of other people's work. They're measured by a meritocracy of Notes, Re-blogs and hearts. They have little control over the environment in which their work is displayed. Pageviews on a website are how you make money. A website is a venue to curate your work. It's how you get someone to PAY ATTENTION TO YOU AND ONLY YOU. <br /><br />Art isn't democratic. It doesn't take place in a caring, sharing environment. It is a huge "look at me". We are the pre-schoolers who can still point at what we've done and get a sticker, and we want to keep getting those stickers forever. <br /><br />I would never decry any service as worthless. There are people who have caught mass attention via Tumblr, and sold great piles of things as a result. There's a use for everything, and an exception to every rule. The exceptions are the reasons that others try. But Tumblr sets the bar of success incredibly low. The payout will almost always be zero. Not beer money, nothing.<br /><br />When I exhibited at San Diego Comicon, the main sellers were t-shirts. Most of the people at SDCC don't really care about your comic. They're there for some fun, they couldn't give two toots about your comic. A fun tshirt hit the spot in the way that a 200-page book you spent a year working on wouldn't. And fair enough. But the pattern of the day was exhausting. Every two minutes or so, someone would walk past your table, point at something you'd made and say "that's funny," before walking on. <br /><br />Funny... but not funny enough to buy. Which is fair enough!<br /><br />Tumblr is the "that's funny" archetype writ large. A million bells and whistles going off at once. To attempt to "win" on Tumblr, you have to drive your work down to the lowest common denominator, collect your "that's funny", and then, that's it! It's the equivalent of pasting your work up on bus shelter glass in a rainstorm. The sun comes out, your work is gone, no matter how many people laughed at it.<br /><br />The arguments for loss of "ownership" of intellectual property when people reblog your work are something else altogether. In the end, once you put something where you can get it, someone will have their fun with it if they want to. My great fear is that, in throwing work up into the air with a thousand other things, rather than nailing it down, what makes something special is gone. <br /><br />Maybe Tumblr isn't the issue, maybe the world is changing. Why should it stop now? But I know that the reason I have a living at all is because I was able to build a relationship with my readers through my work. The less tangible that relationship is, the less special what you are doing seems, the less likely you are to be able to go from a hobbyist to a professional. My job is one of my greatest joys and there should be room for plenty of others to feel that way. I could never have got into the industry pre-webcomics. I don't want there to be a post-webcomics.http://sgrblog.blogspot.com/2013/03/post-webcomics.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (John A)19tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13005893.post-454426767219120966Thu, 03 Jan 2013 14:17:00 +00002013-01-03T14:17:08.254+00:00My top forty albums of 2012Here are my top forty albums/EPs of 2012. I can't believe there were forty! <br /><br /><b>1 PLUMB - Field Music</b><br /> 2 SWING LO MAGELLAN - Dirty Projectors<br /> 3 SUNKEN CONDOS - Donald Fagen<br /> 4 MAC DEMARCO 2 - Mac Demarco<br /> 5 YOUNG MAN IN AMERICA - Anais Mitchell<br /> 6 IN OUR HEADS - Hot Chip<br /> 7 OPEN YOUR HEART - The Men<br /> 8 TRAMP - Sharon Van Etten<br /> 9 CHOREOGRAPHY - Weird Dreams<br /> 10 SILVER AGE - Bob Mould<br /> <br /> 11 ATTACK ON MEMORY - Cloud Nothings<br /> 12 CHARMER - Aimee Mann<br /> 13 OSHIN - DIIV<br /> 14 CRYK - Cate Le Bon<br /> 15 EKSTASIS - Julia Holter<br /> 16 METZ - Metz<br /> 17 SHIELDS - Grizzly Bear<br /> 18 MATURE THEMES - Ariel Pink's Haunted Haunted Graffiti<br /> 19 CLEAR MOON / OCEAN ROAR - Mount Eerie<br /> 20 MID AIR - Paul Buchanan<br /> <br /> 21 THE CHAD TAPE - Chris Reimer<br /> 22 KALEIDOSCOPE DREAM - Miguel<br /> 23 I KNOW WHAT LOVE ISN'T - Jens Lekman<br /> 24 MAKING IT - Stew & The Negro Problem<br /> 25 A THING CALLED DIVINE FITS - Divine Fits<br /> 26 SILENT HOUR EP - Daniel Rossen<br /> 27 SPOOKY ACTION AT A DISTANCE - Lotus Plaza<br /> 28 POSITIVE FORCE - Delicate Steve<br /> 29 ILLUMINATED PEOPLE - Islet<br /> 30 FIN - John Talabot <br /> <br /> 31 AWE NATURALE - THEESatisfaction<br /> 32 BBC RADIO 3 SESSION - Field Music & Warm Digits<br /> 33 ALWAYS EP - Summer Camp<br /> 34 CENTIPEDE HZ - Animal Collective<br /> 35 DJANGO DJANGO - Django Django<br /> 36 ELECTRIC CABLES - Lightships<br /> 37 VET DREAM EP - Grass Cannons <br /> 38 ON THE HOT DOG STREETS - Go-Kart Mozart<br /> 39 THE SOUND OF THE LIFE OF THE MIND - Ben Folds Five<br /> 40 INTO THE WAVES - Sophia Knapphttp://sgrblog.blogspot.com/2013/01/my-top-forty-albums-of-2012.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (John A)6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13005893.post-1701086508923452887Thu, 27 Dec 2012 17:14:00 +00002012-12-27T17:14:41.039+00:00Album charts 2011The 2011 Charlotte and Shauna album reviews have vanished from the archive, so if you want to read them, here they are.<br /><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://www.scarygoround.com/scare/msw%20backup/20111226.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="http://www.scarygoround.com/scare/msw%20backup/20111226.png" width="226" /></a></div><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://www.scarygoround.com/scare/msw%20backup/20111227.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="http://www.scarygoround.com/scare/msw%20backup/20111227.png" width="226" /></a></div><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://www.scarygoround.com/scare/msw%20backup/20111228.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="http://www.scarygoround.com/scare/msw%20backup/20111228.png" width="226" /></a></div><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://www.scarygoround.com/scare/msw%20backup/20111229.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="http://www.scarygoround.com/scare/msw%20backup/20111229.png" width="226" /></a></div><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://www.scarygoround.com/scare/msw%20backup/20111230.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="http://www.scarygoround.com/scare/msw%20backup/20111230.png" width="226" /></a></div>http://sgrblog.blogspot.com/2012/12/album-charts-2011.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (John A)2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13005893.post-4240659835689409398Fri, 21 Sep 2012 00:01:00 +00002012-09-21T00:01:00.175+00:00Pencils to play with 2<br />No comic for Friday September 21st, so I've posted some more of my pencils for artists to play with. Ink them, colour them, then post up what you did in the comments for this post. If you work traditionally, it might be a nice idea to tweak them into bluelines in Photoshop then print them out at your preferred size. They're 600dpi and A4 size, so there's plenty of room to blow them up.<br /><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-vNmTmpizSaM/UFs7CnFMH9I/AAAAAAAABSQ/4E1TK5ZNiAE/s1600/20120917.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="226" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-vNmTmpizSaM/UFs7CnFMH9I/AAAAAAAABSQ/4E1TK5ZNiAE/s320/20120917.png" width="320" /></a></div>&nbsp;<a href="http://scarygoround.com/blog/pencils3.png" target="_blank">Pencils for this comic</a><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-azevAlWnE58/UFs7MLW-aaI/AAAAAAAABSY/Y5VQVuzSsOI/s1600/20120814.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-azevAlWnE58/UFs7MLW-aaI/AAAAAAAABSY/Y5VQVuzSsOI/s320/20120814.png" width="226" /></a></div><a href="http://scarygoround.com/blog/pencils4.png" target="_blank">Pencils for this comic</a>http://sgrblog.blogspot.com/2012/09/pencils-to-play-with-2.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (John A)3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13005893.post-4341761651113015898Wed, 29 Aug 2012 16:16:00 +00002012-08-29T16:16:40.860+00:00I'm having to compile my THAT story into a book rather more quickly than I thought I would due to some deadline issues. Usually I have a period of months to think about any extra pages for a book - I can look back and spot the gaps I need to plug - but I have mere weeks to get this to the printer. It's nice to give book buyers a little extra, so did I leave any glaring holes in the plot that I need to fill? Please be gentle, I take criticism like a plank to the shank. <a href="http://www.scarygoround.com/scare/?date=20120709" target="_blank">You can read from the start here.</a><br /><br />Here's the cover, hope you like it!<br /><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-Uxsm6yiZ7Co/UD4__-9zwLI/AAAAAAAABR4/zPFv5KjpfE4/s1600/that-frnt-cover-web.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="640" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-Uxsm6yiZ7Co/UD4__-9zwLI/AAAAAAAABR4/zPFv5KjpfE4/s640/that-frnt-cover-web.png" width="452" /></a></div><br />http://sgrblog.blogspot.com/2012/08/im-having-to-compile-my-that-story-into.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (John A)13tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13005893.post-6593209250381676371Thu, 02 Aug 2012 15:54:00 +00002012-08-02T15:54:56.754+00:00Another redone pageThere are a few very early Bad Machinery pages that I drew under difficult circumstances. I had to take &nbsp;a few of them to task ready for the collection. Then I had to fix some of the changes because the way I draw the characters has obviously changed since late 2009/early 2010. then I drew about 15 extra pages to go in between existing pages, just to flesh out certain scenes that were left a little abrupt by the daily format.<br /><br />Here's the only one I had to redo almost from scratch - mainly because I had to draw Erin's car again for the new pages and couldn't recreate the odd looking thing I drew back at the end of '09.<br /><br /><b>ORIGINAL:</b><br /><br /><a href="http://scarygoround.com/strips/20100104.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="282" src="http://scarygoround.com/strips/20100104.png" width="400" /></a><a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-eO-HR_MXjYs/UBqh5c3l7KI/AAAAAAAABRk/xwZm2J7exnc/s1600/20100104-revs.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><br /></a><br /><br clear=all><br /><b>REVISED:</b><br /><br /><a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-eO-HR_MXjYs/UBqh5c3l7KI/AAAAAAAABRk/xwZm2J7exnc/s1600/20100104-revs.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="282" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-eO-HR_MXjYs/UBqh5c3l7KI/AAAAAAAABRk/xwZm2J7exnc/s400/20100104-revs.png" width="400" /></a>http://sgrblog.blogspot.com/2012/08/another-redone-page.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (John A)7tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13005893.post-4033863303516985373Wed, 25 Jul 2012 16:52:00 +00002012-07-25T16:54:47.736+00:00On tshirts<span style="font-family: inherit; line-height: 20px;">The difference between a tshirt selling and not selling is whether it makes a statement about the wearer. It doesn't matter how good the drawing on it is, or how clever the words you put on it, that won't make it sell.&nbsp;</span><br /><span style="font-family: inherit; line-height: 20px;"><br /></span><br /><span style="font-family: inherit; line-height: 20px;">Over the years, I and many of my fellow creators have complained that we design something, readers are vocally enthusiastic about it, then no-one buys it. I can think of a dozen times where I laboured over a design and no one wanted it, and as many where 15 minutes work proved wildly popular - because the idea was fine, because it said something that the wearer wanted to say about themselves. There is a huge difference between an image someone likes and an image that fosters the desire to wear it.&nbsp;</span><br /><span style="font-family: inherit; line-height: 20px;"><br /></span><br /><span style="font-family: inherit; line-height: 20px;">Below is a good example of something that makes people laugh but that I don't think says anything about the wearer that they could explain to anyone who asked.&nbsp;</span><br /><span style="font-family: inherit; line-height: 20px;"><br /></span><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-6mSAhDDViV4/UBAjuzgvGtI/AAAAAAAABRY/voxFI1i0AhQ/s1600/lizard-vs-wizard-web.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><img border="0" height="400" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-6mSAhDDViV4/UBAjuzgvGtI/AAAAAAAABRY/voxFI1i0AhQ/s400/lizard-vs-wizard-web.png" width="395" /></span></a></div><span style="font-family: inherit; line-height: 20px;"><br /></span><br /><span style="font-family: inherit; line-height: 20px;"><br /></span><br /><span style="font-family: inherit; line-height: 20px;">The rules are different for prints, posters and any other designed curio. They're not plastered onto a human body. After I got a button machine, I found that the easiest way to tell if wording worked on a tshirt was to try it on badges at shows. The stakes were low and experimentation was cheap.</span><br /><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span><br /><span style="font-family: inherit; line-height: 20px;">Printed tshirts went way beyond saturation point a few years ago; they used to represent the greater part of my income and they certainly don't now. I've used all my easy ideas, so while I can design garments far more nicely than I could in 2003, I (personally) have nothing left to say that I, or someone else, hasn't said. But I try occasionally, because when it works, it feels great. And I've done some fun collaborations where I didn't have to marry my drawings up to some universal notion.</span><br /><span style="font-family: inherit; line-height: 20px;"><br /></span><br /><span style="font-family: inherit; line-height: 20px;">In conclusion: when lizard fights wizard, no one wins. Let that be a lesson to you.</span>http://sgrblog.blogspot.com/2012/07/on-tshirts.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (John A)23tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13005893.post-654133124233766359Wed, 18 Jul 2012 16:45:00 +00002012-07-18T16:45:12.424+00:00GhostsI recently ran out of copies of Ghosts, a standalone book I put out in 2007. I ordered a lot of them and for that reason, I don't think it's worth printing more. But I've done <a href="http://shop.scarygoround.com/product/ghosts-ebook" target="_blank">an eBook edition</a> for people who want this short yarn and put a new cover on it. To say it took me 30 minutes, I was pretty pleased with it! I've spent twenty times as long getting covers wrong in the past.<br /><div><br /></div><div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-AoSeZq-ue2A/UAbj5D7MYKI/AAAAAAAABQ8/tjSf4swA0vY/s1600/ghosts-ebook-cover-web.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="640" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-AoSeZq-ue2A/UAbj5D7MYKI/AAAAAAAABQ8/tjSf4swA0vY/s640/ghosts-ebook-cover-web.png" width="419" /></a></div><br /><div>The original cover is the first finished work I did in Manga Studio, before I even had the Cintiq. God it was hard work getting anything to look right that day, but I really liked it at the time.</div><div><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-uTkgWL05gOk/UAbnYihq1bI/AAAAAAAABRM/vBeU2jS-rYw/s1600/ghosts-cover-old.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-uTkgWL05gOk/UAbnYihq1bI/AAAAAAAABRM/vBeU2jS-rYw/s320/ghosts-cover-old.png" width="225" /></a></div><br /></div></div>http://sgrblog.blogspot.com/2012/07/ghosts.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (John A)5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13005893.post-1563453180340991457Wed, 11 Jul 2012 17:31:00 +00002012-07-11T17:31:08.637+00:00Short storiesI wanted to write briefly about why I break up the long Bad Machinery stories with shorter stories now. I'm sure there are Bad Machinery fans who want the stories to run on straight away, one after another (how times change!) and fair enough. But these six month yarns are epic, tiring and laborious undertakings and I need space in between to experiment with other characters and settings, different artistic techniques, and situations that aren't about youngsters.<br /><br />Giant Days was an interesting experiment that people enjoyed, but the set-up involved so many central characters that you almost couldn't write a&nbsp;satisfying&nbsp;short story. It begged for continuity, and after that first story I didn't have a lot else I could say without using material that would eventually be useful for Bad Machinery. So I put those characters away.<br /><br />Murder She Writes and THAT are ways for me try things that can feed back into the main comic, while trying to write things that don't rely on continuity. Scary Go Round was 7 years of experimentation, but I can't just derail stories any more while I wedge myself up a chimney or down a rabbit hole. I know most people don't mind these interruptions, but if you do find them an obstruction to the main event, please see it this way - from my point of view, without them, there is no main event.<br /><br />A bit of a dry old post but there you are.http://sgrblog.blogspot.com/2012/07/short-stories.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (John A)10tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13005893.post-551879691874927941Wed, 13 Jun 2012 08:48:00 +00002012-06-13T08:51:28.693+00:00A Side WinsThe removal of Top Of the Pops from its original Thursday night slot through to its&nbsp;eventual&nbsp;cancellation was one of the greatest pieces of cultural vandalism ever perpetuated in the UK. I believe that it should be reinstituted immediately.<br /><br />"Kids watch videos on Youtube now," goes the old saw. But look at the UK pop charts. A democratic yet moribund parade of played-out album tracks, TV-promoted groaners and club-ready trifles. So what is new? Was it not ever thus? It was. But that wasn't <i>all</i> it was.<br /><br />The disappearance of Top Of The Pops has removed a large section of the record-buying public as-was from the conversation. Music was tribal. You approved, or disapproved, of the horrors before you. The suspects were lined up in numerical order. A side wins.<br /><br />When Top Of The Pops was moved from Thursday to Friday, everyone still in the pub after work, or already out for the night, was gone. Their votes were spoiled. When it was moved from BBC1 to BBC2, its place in the national living room was lost. Its move to Sunday nights to be more "relevant" to the chart "as it happens" missed the point by a country mile. Top Of The Pops was music TV for people who didn't care about relevance. People who cared about that were listening to Radio 1 on a Sunday night pressing record and play.<br /><br />The British pop institutions withered in the wake of TOTP's abdication. Smash Hits crumbled. The NME could neither feed on young bands' prime-time exposure nor build new heroes and now operates a kind of ghost-town faux scene of lillywhite young men that almost no one has ever heard, to diminishing returns. The charts are more teenage now than they were in the early sixties. "Popularity" exists in a vacuum.<br /><br />The Internet changed everything, of course it did. Everything is splintered. There are proliferate niches. There is a "long tail". But in an age of too much information, surely a digest is needed now more than ever. With the iPlayer, it would be there for a whole week, a half hour window into whatever the hell is going on in the charts.<br /><br />UK music needs the natural selection of the charts, vital, red in tooth and claw. It has become a shop with no window. Top Of The Pops was frequently awful. But in its original form, I would argue that it was also essential.http://sgrblog.blogspot.com/2012/06/side-wins.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (John A)3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13005893.post-8733385339672227677Fri, 08 Jun 2012 04:00:00 +00002012-06-08T07:47:52.163+00:00Pencils to play with!<b>UPDATE: LINKS FIXED! SORRY!</b><br /><br />No comic today, so i thought I'd post up some pencils for artists to play with. They're both from comics in this current story. Ink them, colour them, then post up what you did in the comments for this post. If you work traditionally, it might be a nice idea to tweak them into bluelines in Photoshop then print them out at your preferred size. They're 600dpi and A4 size, so there's plenty of room to blow them up.<br /><br /><br /><a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-eKPn2Qhh4eM/T9Df8c5Bt_I/AAAAAAAABQo/FqR1MxkDB2w/s1600/20120405.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="226" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-eKPn2Qhh4eM/T9Df8c5Bt_I/AAAAAAAABQo/FqR1MxkDB2w/s320/20120405.png" style="cursor: move;" width="320" /></a><a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-eKPn2Qhh4eM/T9Df8c5Bt_I/AAAAAAAABQo/FqR1MxkDB2w/s1600/20120405.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"></a><a href="http://badmachinery.com/pencils/pencils-1.png" target="_blank">Download pencils</a><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-ZdXsl4zetG0/T9DgkQUyf-I/AAAAAAAABQw/EoO6YQGQnNk/s1600/20120319.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="226" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-ZdXsl4zetG0/T9DgkQUyf-I/AAAAAAAABQw/EoO6YQGQnNk/s320/20120319.png" width="320" /></a></div><a href="http://badmachinery.com/pencils/pencils-2.png" target="_blank">Download pencils</a><br /><br />http://sgrblog.blogspot.com/2012/06/pencils-to-play-with.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (John A)14tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13005893.post-528634986251744738Mon, 04 Jun 2012 10:44:00 +00002012-06-04T10:44:23.878+00:00Bad Machinery BooksI'm very excited to be putting out Bad Machinery books through Oni Press, starting in 2013. At the moment I'm working on fixing up some of the artork, before adding new pages and making these books less a series of webcomics and more of a coherent piece. Wrestling with that dilemma has been an ongoing thing since 2009.<br /><br />Looking at these old pages closely for the first time since they originally ran was interesting. They're pretty good, if sometimes a bit dense. There are only a few pages where I was obviously having an off day that need careful revision. It's usually a case of fixing the top of an eye or a head or a chin.<br /><br />Where I do greater revision, I never know if people even notice. Why not play spot the difference with the page below. The hardest thing when redrawing figures is keeping them on-model - in the very first Bad Machinery story, the kids were all whippet-like little adventure sprats.<br /><br /><a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-jvxDGgOAeRo/T8yRKXoV1WI/AAAAAAAABQY/6DsYqUsDxs4/s1600/origvrevised.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="640" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-jvxDGgOAeRo/T8yRKXoV1WI/AAAAAAAABQY/6DsYqUsDxs4/s640/origvrevised.png" width="475" /></a><br /><br /><br /><br />http://sgrblog.blogspot.com/2012/06/bad-machinery-books.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (John A)18tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13005893.post-9065987541048937532Tue, 24 Apr 2012 16:26:00 +00002012-04-24T16:30:01.807+00:00Comica Comiket ReviewThis weekend I exhibited at Comica Comiket, and I have a few thoughts about it. <br /><br />Firstly I'd like to thank the organisers and staff, who were helpful all day. The drawing parade was fascinating to watch and I was well looked after throughout.<br /><br />But I cannot ignore the elephant in the room: the hall was near-impossible to traverse. Three people could not pass down the aisles simultaneously, so it was very dificult for people to browse your work comfortably most of the time. Exhibitors on the central aisles were crammed in back to back with almost no room for manoeuver, and it was hard to stand up and engage with people face to face because there was inevitably a chair in your way, buckling you at the knees.<br /><br />I can only speak for my own experience when I say that I couldn't even get to the tables I wanted to, and when the call to pack up was given at 6, I went home empty handed. One of the greatest pleasures of attending these shows is discovering new work and meeting new/rarely seen people, and I felt at the end of a pretty uncomfortable day that I had largely missed out on both of these, with the exception of a very pleasant chat with <a href="http://www.jabberworks.co.uk/index.php">Sarah McIntyre</a>.<br /><br />Having taken part in a signing in the punter-free downstairs room, I felt very sorry for the exhibitors who had been marooned down there. Last year's London Small Press Expo in Deptford was damned by a lack of signage and I felt that these poor souls had suffered the same fate.<br /><br />With seemingly no shortage of attendees or organisational enthusiasm, I hope that Comica can overcome these logistical problems and continue to grow as an event. It's important that the capital has an alternative comics show worthy of the location.http://sgrblog.blogspot.com/2012/04/comica-comiket-review.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (John A)5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13005893.post-9153081869061251149Wed, 07 Mar 2012 20:07:00 +00002012-09-20T15:40:25.199+00:00Karrie Fransman's "The House That Groaned"<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"></div><br />Karrie Fransman is one of the most enthusiastic and engaged comic-makers I've met here in the UK. Following her regular strips in the Guardian's G2 section and the Times, her debut graphic novel has emerged via Random House imprint Square Peg. <br /><br />The loose linework, owing a greater debt to contemporary European art comics than anything published in the English language, will not be to everybody's taste, but perfectly supports the queasy tone of The House That Groaned. And the book is beautifully and imaginatively designed with a splendid die-cut cover.<br /><br />A far cry from the slice-of-life work she did for newspapers, The House That Groaned is a bleak tale built around the interconnecting stories of a group of people living in a house divided into flats. Used to Karrie's more recent comics, I wasn't expecting the body horror, kaleidoscopic sexuality and magical realism it contains. Anyone who enjoyed the icy, anything-goes world of the early nineties Vertigo comics should enjoy the book's unbridled spirit.<br /><br />You can read more about Karrie and The House That Groaned <a href="http://karriefransman.com/">at her website.</a>http://sgrblog.blogspot.com/2012/03/karrie-fransmans-house-that-groaned.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (John A)0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13005893.post-1936112867758156828Mon, 20 Feb 2012 12:27:00 +00002012-02-20T12:27:09.244+00:00The Subscription ExperimentI know that a lot of people are interested in my <a href="http://scarygoround.com/subscriptions.php">subscription experiment</a>, and that I should write a little something about it - at the very least to say thank you to all the people who have taken the time to sign up.<br /><br />I wanted the experiment to be low key. I posted once about it on Twitter, at the weekend (and at a time when most US readers would be asleep), and put a small post on my site under the comic. It's not a Kickstarter, there is no goal, merely a push toward sustainability through the website at a time when I probably won't be able to start putting Bad Machinery book collections out (a substantial part of my projected income in any calendar year) until 2013.<br /><br />In the week since I announced it, I have raised about £4000 (around $6000). This will make a huge difference later this year when a glut of book work for the above collection will make it difficult to do commissions, freelance or prepare special items for conventions. It will buy me a two or three month holiday from near-constant anxiety.<br /><br />I expected most people to subscribe at the lowest tier, £2 or $3, but the majority of donations were in the middle. The fact that readers were willing to commit to an annual donation greater than the baseline was incredibly encouraging. That several people chose the maximum annual subscription really surprised me. <br /><br />I've been looking at sales graphs for a decade, the early spike is pretty much the default setting for things I have done over the years. But that people responded at all, and with such generosity, to a quiet request for support, is something for which I am very grateful. <br /><br />If you enjoy my work and want to support it with a subscription, <a href="http://scarygoround.com/subscriptions.php">you can still do so on this page</a>. <br /><br /><b>Thank you again to everyone who has contributed.</b>http://sgrblog.blogspot.com/2012/02/subscription-experiment.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (John A)16tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13005893.post-5579551169708037684Wed, 25 Jan 2012 12:23:00 +00002012-01-25T12:23:26.681+00:00Delivered on a Segway!Have you ever had a takeaway menu through your door that you just couldn't throw away? No. No one has. Until now. I love this menu. And here's why:<br /><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-xtnLkAo3aW0/Tx_zTKZS8gI/AAAAAAAABIQ/1-qAiGnVPY0/s1600/mcabduls.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="640" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-xtnLkAo3aW0/Tx_zTKZS8gI/AAAAAAAABIQ/1-qAiGnVPY0/s640/mcabduls.jpeg" width="452" /></a></div><br />This is my favourite bit. I want to be in this grid. You want to be in this grid.<br /><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-v03hDX3_NQM/Tx_zfoO8uOI/AAAAAAAABIc/A9Dy-OHhQGU/s1600/mcabduls%2B1.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="286" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-v03hDX3_NQM/Tx_zfoO8uOI/AAAAAAAABIc/A9Dy-OHhQGU/s320/mcabduls%2B1.jpeg" width="320" /></a></div><br />Could it be the best steak you ever tasted? It depends on whether you have ever spent more than £6.95 on a steak and chips dinner, I suppose - but I'd be happy to be proved wrong.<br /><br />People say there are too many fried chicken outlets in metropolitan areas. Perhaps what this astonishing document shows us is that, really, there just aren't enough. <i>Bravo.</i><br /><br /><br /><br />http://sgrblog.blogspot.com/2012/01/delivered-on-segway.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (John A)7